12
JACK TILL SAT BACK in the driver’s seat of the Cadillac and watched the miles of road roll under it. There was a hard wind in the high desert today, and it had blown any suspicion of cloud away. The sky was an unchanging deep blue, and the sun glinted off any piece of metal like a camera flash. Since Till had come down out of the pass into Nevada, he had been able to look out over the emptiness now and then to see dust devils swirling in the distance.
As he drove, he revisited the days before he had taken Wendy Harper away. He had tried not to learn too much about her. He had barely listened even to her volunteered confidences because he had not wanted to figure out where she would be and carry that information in his mind for the next twenty years.
But there had been one question he had asked her repeatedly: “Who is the guy you saw with the waitress? I used to be a homicide detective. I still know nearly everybody in Homicide Special, and a lot of people in Hollywood Homicide. If he killed her, we can get him. They’ll lock him up.”
“I didn’t say she was a waitress. And I only saw him with her once, at night. He didn’t do anything to me. I think he hired the one who did, but that one didn’t say he did. He didn’t say anything.”
Till said, “You know the identity of a person who is missing and maybe dead, at least a description of the murder suspect, and had a good long look at an assailant who is probably working for him. We could do a lot with that, probably connect the two and put them both away.”
“I thought about it all the time in the hospital. I don’t know enough to identify him, much less get him arrested, but he thinks it’s worth paying people to kill me. I’ll run out of blood before he runs out of money. So I’ll go away.”
“I think you know more about him than you’re saying. His name is enough. I can get it to the homicide people without having you hauled in.”
“Here’s the joke. I don’t know his name. She never told me that.”
“Then how do you know he’s behind any of this?”
“When I saw him with her in the parking lot, he was trying to hide his face. He carried himself funny, to stay in the dark part where the shadow of the building hid him. While I watched him, he went to his car to check something inside, but he didn’t open the door because it would turn on the dome light. Don’t you see? It’s a hundred small observations in two or three minutes, and I’ve forgotten sixty of them by now. It’s degenerated into an intuition, and an intuition isn’t good enough. All I can do is get away.”
“Getting out is a huge thing to do,” Till said. “It means giving up your career, and all of the people who care about you.”
Then she had said the most surprising thing to him. “In a way, it’s probably a good thing. My life here has reached a kind of paralysis.”
“So running will solve your personal problems?”
She smiled. “I didn’t ask for this. I had two ribs broken with one swing of that bat. I’m just saying that when something like that happens, it changes your life—everything in your life.”
“Are you one of those women who gets sick and thinks it’s good because she loses weight?”
“No. I didn’t say the change was for the better, and if it were, it wouldn’t be worth it. I know I’m trading old problems for new ones. What I’m really telling you is that I would never have had the guts to walk away from this life unless something big and ugly was chasing me. I’ve got a half-interest in a successful restaurant, with investors begging us to open more locations. It’s worth millions, but I can’t sell it. I also own a half-interest in a million-dollar house with Eric, but I can’t sell that, either. I don’t even have a real career. My career is handling Eric Fuller, keeping him productive, solvent, and supplied with fresh produce and linens.”
“You’re willing to leave him forever?”
“Leaving Eric is the part I hate, but it’s the thing I should have done, anyway. Eric doesn’t need me anymore. He’s a great chef, and he’s got the loyalty of a whole staff of good people we found and trained. He’s got a national reputation now. He’s made. But if I don’t leave, his chance for a real personal life is going to pass. If I’m with him, my chance will pass, too.”
Jack Till fought through the fog of years and brought back details. She had said her mother was dead. Her father had apparently been out of the picture since she was a child. Was he dead, too? She and Eric had grown up in upstate New York. Poughkeepsie. They had gone to college—where? Wisconsin.
Just from the way she had handled her new name, he believed she was too smart to return to the place where she was raised, or the place where she and Eric had gone to college. She would know that there were people who had known her well—teachers, neighbors, friends and the parents of friends, doctors. Even if she could have been sure nobody like that was left, there would be others who knew her by sight or reputation. She would try to stay away from any of the cities where she had lived before.
As he drove through the desert, he kept picturing her, listening to her voice in his memory. It was an uncomfortable feeling, because at the time he had caught himself feeling a strong attraction to her. He had told himself at the time that he had to hide the affection he felt for her: She was running for her life, and he couldn’t go with her. After it was over, he had thought of her often, always reluctantly, and with a sense of loss. But thinking about her now made him feel almost certain. Wendy Harper had changed her name to Ann Delatorre and flown to Las Vegas on August 30 six years ago.
Las Vegas was garish and vulgar and extravagant. It was an endless river of people who thought the rules of the universe were about to change, so this time they would end up with the money and the casino owners would end up with a hangover. Wendy Harper wasn’t a gambler. She had saved most of her money and worked seven days and six nights a week for years. The ambience of Las Vegas didn’t fit with anything Wendy Harper had ever liked. But she had come to Jack Till to learn how to stop being Wendy Harper. She was Ann Delatorre now. Who knew what Ann Delatorre liked?
When Till took the exit from Route 15 at the Mandalay Bay complex, he was once again amazed at the traffic. Ten or fifteen years ago, he and Jimmy DeKuyper had driven here a number of times to pick up fugitives being extradited on L.A. homicides. He had always taken this exit so he could drive up the Strip, and couldn’t remember ever being delayed on the way uptown. Now, going a couple of blocks on the Strip was a project. He decided to check in at a hotel and let a cabdriver do it for him.
He pulled his rental car into the circle at the MGM Grand and saw the valet arrive to drive it away. He got out, and it was as though the door to a blast furnace had opened. The hot, dry wind seemed to take the moisture from his skin and dry his eyes. He walked inside, found his way to the front desk, and stood in line. There were about twenty-five women in gray uniforms along the desk at stations where they were checking people in as quickly as they could, but the lines were still growing behind him. He had been consciously keeping his moves random, always deciding at the last minute according to whim, and now he wondered whether he had made a mistake. But when he reached the front of the line, the woman asked for his reservation but showed no reaction when he said he didn’t have one, and gave him a folder with a set of key cards in it.
He put his suitcase in his room and then went to work. The telephone company had told him Ann Delatorre’s number was unlisted, so he would have to find it another way. He called the offices of unions, and the personnel offices of all the large companies he found in the phone book. When he found nothing, he went back to the telephone book and looked at the ads for local private detectives.